Torn in HalfAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Author Alice Walker has described our nation’s
consumption of animals as a country indulging itself by “eating misery.”
It’s more than that. It’s the eating of little, innocent, newborn, deprived,
shocked, crammed, shackled, and stabbed-to-death creatures who struggle in
vain trying to stay alive. Flesh at any price.
I’ll be the first to sign up and help lead the “Charge!” But I often wonder
if I’m pursuing an ideal because it is right (as if such atrocities were
happening to me and mine), or because that’s what the animals themselves
would want me to do.

A number of years ago, I was involved in the prosecution of a case in
which a young calf had been forced to walk the auction block after his hind
legs had been severed below the hocks. Defenders of the action claimed it
was common practice to sometimes sell calves who had been maimed during the
birthing delivery. Steel tongs are often used to turn calves around inside
the cows when nature has failed to position them properly. Injuries occur,
and in this case (as in many, the auction’s owners declared), the calf’s
hind legs had been severed at the joints.

And so here he came: a little black calf, barely a month old, dragging
himself along on his front hooves while stumps of hind legs attempted to
keep up. Onto the auction block he went, where he was promptly bought by a
meatpacking company.

Enjoy your veal — er, meal — America.

Author Alice Walker has described our nation’s consumption of animals as a
country indulging itself by “eating misery.”

It’s more than that. It’s the eating of little, innocent, newborn, deprived,
shocked, crammed, shackled, and stabbed-to-death creatures who struggle in
vain trying to stay alive. Flesh at any price.

America’s addiction to meat is a hideous creature itself with a denial
technique the size of its monstrous appetite. Over ten billion living,
feeling creatures a year are sacrificed to feed its faces, at the speed of
300 bleeding, kicking, screaming beings a second.

Oh, lucky are some of us who can sit back and dream about that day when the
world goes vegetarian. We give it our all to reach such a paradise through
our resource materials and our conferences, our books and our pledges, our
ideologies and our philosophies. And the slogans abound: “Speaking for those
who can’t” and “a voice for the voiceless.” But are we really doing those
things?

If we could miraculously read the animals’ minds, would we find they would
want to be martyrs for the cause? Would they care if we made a federal case
out of their suffering? Would it matter to them that the goal — for them and
for us — is a vegetarian world? Somehow (and maybe my mind is just that
limited) I can’t imagine animals projecting that far, in those ways, into
the future. In fact, I would go further and say that it is we who project
onto them what the goals of the animal rights movement ought to be.

“Not bigger cages, but empty ones.”

I’ll be the first to sign up and help lead the “Charge!” But I often wonder
if I’m pursuing an ideal because it is right (as if such atrocities were
happening to me and mine), or because that’s what the animals themselves
would want me to do.

It is rare to have empathy for others.

If it were so common, the world would be vegetarian by now and we’d have no
arguments to put forth. Denial of the truths in our midst prevents so many
people from feeling that nature-given gift of empathy. And so the machine
that grinds up living beings without a single thought, much less a second
one, continues relatively unchallenged and definitely unabated.

There is another gift we’ve been given by nature, and that’s the ability to
imagine the world not from our own perspective but from the vantage point of
those with whom we empathize.

When I visited a dairy farm not too long ago, I found the female calves
chained in doghouse-like boxes. Though they had no teeth, they were fed a
bucket of grain each day and only one serving of water. One calf in
particular caught my attention. She could only have been a day old. Her
umbilical cord was still attached, and she was crying pitifully. When I
comforted her with the only thing I had to offer — my fingers to suck on — I
could hear then the relentless bellowing of a cow across the driveway behind
me. It didn’t take long to realize the cow was the calf’s mother. In that
moment I knew that if I was ever to speak for those who can’t and to be a
voice for the voiceless, I would have to abandon my strategies and
campaigns, my writings and my educational outreach activism, and do one
thing: find a way to give that cow back her baby.

One cow and one calf out of tens of millions of cattle (and billions of
other consumed animals) is nothing, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things.
On the other hand, doesn’t the concept of “speaking for those who can’t”
compel us to abandon schemes? Even grand ones?

I am torn by this dilemma. I believe the changes we make to the bigger
picture change things only for those who are yet unborn. Not that they
matter less, but their struggle has not begun. They are not in the midst of
it, bellowing across the driveway or struggling to walk on legs torn in
half.

End whaling. Stop the wolf hunt. Go veggie. Amen. But along the way, we must
listen carefully. Because, you see, animals are not voiceless. They are
crying, and if you listen carefully the sound is deafening. If it means you
hoist the calf over the fence and give her back to her mother — because
that’s what the animals want — then, by all means, unchain her — and lift!

I salute the trench workers, those who reach out to the individual,
seemingly unheard voices among us, and set aside the utopia they fight for
long enough to pull one more being into the land of the living.

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